Aim of 'residential schools' was to get the land ... "One day the north will be strong and free..." Date: November 02, 2008 05:13PM

http://www.nunatsiaq.com/discussion/read.php?1,4287,4288#msg-4288

The true aim of the Indian residential schools was not to destroy the Indian in every child, as the governments continue to keep on claiming. It was just a ploy. The true aim of the Indian residential school system was to get the land of the native peoples, that was all they were intended to do, and it had worked remarably well. The Inuit of the eastern arctic had not really been included in the residential school fiasco until the end of the 1950's. The Inuit at that time had been sent to hostels in a few communities, this was for the Inuit of Quebec. The government had to work extremely fast in the beginning of the 1960's to ship young Inuit children to the one main residential school located at Churchill, anarq, because talk about residential schools were beginning to surface in southern Canada at that time. So the federal government worked on the scheme of Ralph Ritcey, who was just another englishman pedophile, to make the former army base in Churchill into a residential school. The government worked fast, extremely fast so that they could destroy our strong cultural and family ties just before they were done away with. The government had just this one chance to divide us up and seperate us from our families for long periods of time. The Churchill Vocational Center opened it's doors in 1964 and closed in 1973. And negotiations for the land started in 1973, makes sense? And negotiations for the land started in Nunavut shortly thereafter. The governments have almost gotten away with the crime of the century, which was to obtain my land by whatever means available. But just wait here one minute everyone, I am not finished yet. I have not surrendered or signed away of my rights or title to my land, nor some of my people, so in fact I still retain my rights to the land that my grandfathers and father had seen and walked on, I still do. And the unauthorized developments that have been taking place on my land have been going without my consent. And if the people who have not signed away their rights to their land on which their fathers walked and lived on decide to do so, we can kick out the developers of my land by force. It is still my land, and if I decide to do so, I can still make a claim for the whole territory north of the 55th parallel in northern Quebec, now known as the Kativik region. I am not finished yet, the Indian in me is not yet destroyed, in fact it has just gotten more stronger, and my resolve to right this horrible wrong has just gotten stronger as well. One day the north will be strong and free but for now someone else is taking care of it for my people and the job is being very poorly done. One day I will get my land back, one way or another, either through peace or force.

*****

Egerton Ryerson described his mandate for the 1847 report commissioned by Ontario, wherein he recommended that the government run the 'Indian' Residential Schools:

"There is a need to raise the Indian to the level of the whiteman, and take the land out of Indians hands."

Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings

Tuberculosis took the lives of students at residential schools for at least 40 years

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GRANNYNOTE: AS CANADA'S COURT-ORDERED, UN-SUPERVISED 'TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION' TRIES AGAIN IN 2010 TO BEGIN ITS VVORK, A REVIEVV OF THE HEINOUS FACTS ... THE TRUTH OF CANADA'S ACTIONS ... IS NECESSARY.

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THIS INFORMATION TO ALL CANADIANS
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Globe and Mail investigation

BILL CURRY AND KAREN HOWLETT

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

April 24, 2007 at 1:30 AM EST

OTTAWA — As many as half of the aboriginal children who attended the early years of residential schools died of tuberculosis, despite repeated warnings to the federal government that overcrowding, poor sanitation and a lack of medical care were creating a toxic breeding ground for the rapid spread of the disease, documents show.

A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the highly contagious disease.


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GRANNYNOTE: IN 1901, IT BECAME CANADIAN POLICY TO SEGREGATE PEOPLE VVITH TUBERCULOSIS FROM OTHER PEOPLE TO AVOID THE SPREAD OF THE DEADLY DISEASE. NO SUCH EFFORTS VVERE MADE TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN IN CANADA'S 'INDIAN' RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. THEY DIED IN NUMBERS SO HIGH THAT IT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED BY NORMAL TRANSMISSION. IT VVAS DELIBERATE MASS MURDER PERPETRATED BY THE GOVERNMENTS OF CANADA AND THE CATHOLIC, ANGLICAN AND UNITED CHURCHES OF CANADA.
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Peter Bryce, the department's chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.

With less than four months to go before Ottawa officially settles out of court with most former students, a group calling itself the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children is urging the government to acknowledge this period in the tragic residential-schools saga – and not just the better-known cases of physical and sexual abuse.

Last week, Liberal MP Gary Merasty wrote to Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice asking the government to look into the concerns. Mr. Prentice's spokesman, Bill Rogers, told The Globe that departmental officials have been asked to meet with native groups.

Some of their stories, including tales of children buried in unmarked graves beside the schools, are told in a new documentary by Kevin Annett, a former United Church minister, titled Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide.

Mr. Annett, as well as some academics, argue that the government's handling, combined with Canada's official policy of removing children from their homes for 10 months each year to attend distant schools, does indeed fit the United Nations definition of genocide.

The UN definition, adopted after the Second World War, lists five possible acts that qualify as genocide, of which killing is only one. The fifth act is described as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

But transcripts of debates in 1952 of the House of Commons external affairs committee, reviewed by The Globe, show public servants advised politicians not to enshrine a definition of genocide into law, despite Canada's promise internationally to do so.

In 2000, four years after the last residential school closed, the government finally adopted a limited definition of genocide, excluding the line about forcible transfer of children. But courts have rejected native claims of genocide against Ottawa and the churches because Canada had no law banning genocide while the schools were operating.

“It's another crime,” said Roland Chrisjohn, a professor of native studies at St. Thomas University who has written extensively on the subject. “Canada can't define genocide to suit its own purposes.”
(See http://www.dominionpaper.ca/original_peoples/2006/10/12/like_weeds.html )

Few argue that the policy was genocidal in the Nazi sense of deliberately killing people. Rather, the focus was on killing native culture in the name of assimilation, said John Milloy, a Trent University professor.

“The purpose of the [federal government's] policy is to eradicate Indians as a cultural group,” said Prof. Milloy, who has had more access to government files on the subject than any other researcher. “If genocide has to do with destroying a people's culture, this is genocidal, no doubt about it. But to call it genocidal is to misunderstand how the system works.”

Whatever the definition, there is no disputing the deadly swath tuberculosis cut through native schools.

Dr. Bryce followed up his 1907 report with a second one two years later, this time on the toll TB was taking in Alberta residential schools. He recommended that Ottawa take over responsibility of the schools from church control.

The Globe has uncovered letters in the archives showing that many others issued similar warnings. Just a few months after Dr. Bryce's 1909 report, the department's Indian agent for Duck Lake, Sask., wrote to his Ottawa colleagues: “The department should realize that under present circumstances about one-half of the children who are sent to the Duck Lake boarding school die before the age of 18, or very shortly afterward.”

Another document published in 1914 shows Dr. Bryce's findings were accepted by Duncan Campbell Scott, the most influential senior Indian Affairs official of the period. “It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein,” Mr. Scott wrote in an essay.

But one of the documents obtained by The Globe reveals Mr. Scott's department rejected the doctor's recommendations because the government did not want to upset the churches that ran the schools.

The residential schools were an extension of religious missionary work. They started receiving federal support in 1874 as part of Canada's campaign to assimilate aboriginals into Christian society by obliterating their language, religion and culture. Well over 100,000 native children passed through the schools, most of which were closed in the mid-1970s.

The tuberculosis problem was symptomatic of the deplorable living conditions for the thousands of children uprooted from their communities and placed in the care of strangers. Tuberculosis is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, entering the body through breathing and infecting the lungs. It can then spread to the central nervous system, bones and joints, according to the Canadian Lung Association.

In May, 1930, at the Shubenacadie Residential School in Nova Scotia, officials were coping with an outbreak of tuberculosis seven months after the facility opened. But it was the arrival several years later of James Paul, a new student with an advanced case of tuberculosis, that raised the ire of the school's visiting physician.

“Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium,” D. F. MacInnis says in a letter to Indian Affairs.

Later, Dr. MacInnis wrote to the school principal: “We are apparently getting all the advanced TB cases and syphilities in the three provinces shipped into our school and apparently there is no way left for us to keep them out. It is very unfair to the children who are clean and well.”

Although most students from this period are no longer alive, some who attended later recall sharing sleeping quarters with dying children.

“I've known some students that died there and I don't know how they died. All we know is we had their funeral service,” said Harry Lucas, 66, who attended Christie Indian Residential on Vancouver Island from 1948 to 1958.

“There were quite a few grave sites there that I always questioned. We were able to sleep next to a person that was dying. They didn't put them away in separate rooms. That was always kind of spooky for me.”

Ted Quewezance, the executive director of the National Residential School Survivors Society, attended Gordon Residential School and St. Philip Residential School in Saskatchewan from 1960 to 1969. He said he has spoken to thousands of former students across Canada.

“We'd see [funerals] monthly,” he said. “We were never able to ask what they were. It's no different right across the country. There's even some graves unmarked. Kids were buried at the school, but now we're talking about how do we bring our survivors home?”

The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared Residential School Children claims thousands of children are buried in unmarked graves near the schools. Many of their stories are contained in the documentary by Mr. Annett ( Link: Unrepentent ) who says he was ousted from the United Church in 1995 after raising concerns about the church's residential-school history.

(The United Church rejects Mr. Annett's version of events, pointing to a three-week termination hearing in which several witnesses said he was a confrontational figure who was a poor manager of his Port Alberni church.)

James Scott of the United Church said there is relatively little solid information on deaths at the schools because archivists have been so focused on researching claims of living former students.

“My sense is that the more we find out about [the schools], the deeper our understanding of the catastrophic impact of the residential schools on aboriginal people, on their families and their culture,” he said.

Bede Hubbard of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said the Roman Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, noted that previous research has shown the churches made many pleas to Ottawa for more money to improve standards.

“I didn't realize that the rates of tuberculosis were that high. In the 1930s, tuberculosis was rampant in Canada itself, so it shouldn't be surprising then that it was also a problem in the residential schools.”

Prof. Milloy of Trent University is the only outsider to have accessed the locked vault of Indian Affairs records through his role as a senior researcher for the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

In 1999, he published his research in a book titled A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System. Prof. Milloy expressed discomfort with the campaign of Mr. Annett and others to introduce language such as genocide and “aboriginal holocaust.”

What government and church records do show, he said, is that the deaths were primarily due to the policy of paying churches on a per-capita basis to run the schools. Numerous letters indicate that because of the funding policy, churches would admit sick children and refuse to send ailing ones home. Pleas to the department for more funding fell on deaf ears.

“That's why there's so many kids sleeping in so few beds in so many dormitories across the country,” Prof. Milloy said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of ‘Let's get them sick with tuberculosis and wipe them out as a species on the earth.' It's the fact that the feds won't spend any money on this, and that's what it leads to.”

As for Dr. Bryce, the man who first sounded the alarm, he was shuffled to another department. The position of chief medical officer was terminated and the government appears to have made no further effort to gather statistics on deaths at the schools. Ottawa did not take over control of all schools until 1969.

In 1922, after he retired, Dr. Bryce penned a diatribe against Ottawa's lack of response to his reports.

The title: The Story of a National Crime.

A HISTORY OF SHAME

EARLY YEARS

Started before Confederation as part of religious missionary work, residential schools originally focused on replacing aboriginal beliefs with Christianity. More than 70 per cent of the schools were run by the Roman Catholic Church; the rest by the Anglican and United Churches.

FEDERAL INVOLVEMENT

The federal government started funding residential schools in 1874, using American Industrial Schools as the model for introducing manual labour and agricultural skills to natives. To encourage children to use English and French, they were physically punished for speaking their own languages.

OTTAWA TAKES OVER

There were 72 residential schools in 1948 and 9,368 students. Ottawa took full control of the schools in 1969 and most were closed during the 1970s. The last school shut its doors in 1996.

THE LEGACY

Stories of physical and sexual abuse began to emerge in the 1980s, and became major news when Manitoba Chief Phil Fontaine, now the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, went public with his story of sexual abuse as a student.

In April of 2006, Ottawa reached a $1.9-billion agreement with former students to settle their class-action lawsuits out of court and compensate for the loss of language and culture. Further money has been set aside to settle claims of physical and sexual abuse. Students have until Aug. 20 to accept the package. Bill Curry

RAISING CONCERN

January, 1919

Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior Indian Affairs official, talks about the inadequacy of the school buildings in a memorandum to Arthur Meighen, then Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. “They were unsanitary and they were undoubtedly chargeable with a very high death rate among the pupils.”

December, 1920

A report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs says 33 students at the Sarcee school near Calgary are afflicted with tuberculosis.

February, 1925

W.M. Graham, Indian Commissioner for Saskatchewan, says in a letter to Mr. Scott: “We will have to do something to stop this indiscriminate admission of children without first passing a medical exam. ... I quite often hear from the Indians that they do not want to send their children to school as it is a place where they are sent to die.”

February, 1925

Russell T. Ferrier, Superintendent of Indian Education, writes to Indian commissioners and agents, saying each child should be pronounced fit by a medical officer before being admitted to a school. “When a pupil's health becomes a matter of concern soon after admission, the consequent parental alarm and distrust militates against successful recruiting.”

March, 1932

The Department of Indian Affairs announces that as a result of spending cutbacks, it cannot authorize admitting children with tuberculosis to a sanatorium or hospital unless the patient requires “care for relief of actual suffering.” Karen Howlett

Original source. www.theglobeandmail.com

Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings


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GRANNYNOTE: THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA IS ATTEMPTING TO CONTROL THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION BY CONTROLLIN ITS FUNDS AND BY STACKING THE COMMISSION VVITH GOVERNMENT/CHURCH-FRIENDLY APPOINTEES.

VVILL CANADIANS ACCEPT THE VVHITEASH?
DO VVE VVANT TO KNOVV THE REAL TRUTH?

Government policy created the myth of the "lazy Indian"

These people, once described as the “original affluent society” by anthropologists, now are the country’s poorest. It took a century of deliberate and careless policy by governments and industry to make them poor.

http://www.straight.com/article-201674/john-lutz-government-policy-created-myth-lazy-indian

Government policy created the myth of the "lazy Indian" By John Lutz Why, with all the resources the Canadian government pours into aboriginal communities, is the on-reserve Indian population among the most impoverished in Canada? Why do they rank poorest in Canada across the main measures of physical health (life expectancy, HIV/AIDS infection, diabetes rates) or social health (education, incarceration, suicide, substance abuse)? The government has tried its best and failed, and so it seems to many of us that the problem must lie with the aboriginal people themselves. The phrase “lazy Indian” rises into our minds, even if we are afraid to say it out loud. The stereotype of the “lazy Indian” starts early in the history of European colonization and is one of the most powerful and persistent. It is also one of the most perverse characterizations of a population that considered laziness to be one of the worst faults. A close look at our history shows that aboriginal people have historically been eager to work and that the poverty in so many First Nations communities is a phenomenon brought on by deliberate and inadvertent government policies over the past 60 years. It is well known that the first Europeans here wanted furs and traded them from aboriginal people. It is not well known that aboriginal people welcomed the traders, and in many cases, like the Lekwungen, helped build trading posts like Fort Victoria. It is even less known that aboriginal people were the first gold and coal miners in the province. The first coal mine in British Columbia, near present-day Port Hardy, was entirely worked over several years by the resident Kwakwaka’waka people. The next mine, at Nanaimo, depended on Sne ney mux men to keep it going. The first commercial fishermen and loggers in the colonies were aboriginal workers, and when the salmon-canning industry boomed in the 1880s, Native women canned the fish in industrial canneries from the Fraser River to the Nass, while their husbands caught the fish. The first modern sawmill in B.C. was built at Port Alberni in 1862, and over half the 200 to 300 workers were Nuu-chah-nulth men. The big sawmills established in the 1860s on Burrard Inlet employed “runaway sailors and Indians”, according to mill manager R.H. Alexander, used Squamish longshoremen, and bought their logs from the Sechelt people. Through the 19th century, aboriginal people worked as farmers and farm workers, stevedores and ships’ crew, and helped build the roads, railways, and public buildings. Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist, wrote in 1886 that “Almost all the labour of the province is done by Indians and Chinese” and all agreed that aboriginal people were well off—richer even than many whites. The 20th century has been hard on aboriginal people. The explosion of immigrants created new competition for jobs they used to hold and racism gave preference to the whites. With the immigrants came laws that deprived the majority aboriginal population of the vote, and confined them to reserves and inferior education. Without the vote, it was easy for white politicians and bureaucrats to discriminate against aboriginal people in issuing fishing licenses, logging permits, and grazing and water rights. They could not study law or operate many businesses. Other laws curtailed Native fishing for food to save salmon for the canneries, and hunting to protect game for sports hunters. The Indian agents warned their bosses of the consequences: “the game regulations...worked a great hardship on the Indians and thrown them more or less on relief [welfare]”. When labour was short during the wars, aboriginal people were again hired everywhere and were again pushed out when the soldiers came home; but after World War II it was no longer possible to live off the land. Until the 1950s, per-capita expenditure for social assistance or “welfare” for Indians was a fraction of that of other Canadians. By the 1970s, it was much higher and a generation of aboriginal children had grown up as “welfare Indians”. Today, there is enormous diversity between the poorest and richest in aboriginal communities, and between aboriginal communities, some of which are vibrant, healthy, and economically “comfortable”. But in many communities there are now several generations who have grown up in the welfare trap, with all the accompanying social problems that poverty brings. These people, once described as the “original affluent society” by anthropologists, now are the country’s poorest. It took a century of deliberate and careless policy by governments and industry to make them poor. It will take a new approach by government and all British Columbians to help them back to social and economic health. John Lutz is an associate professor of history at the University of Victoria, and the author of the new book Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations.

Forced off the land: Scotland, North America 'This is almost like a spiritual quest for us'

Published Date: 16 December 2008

By Jim Gilchrist

FOR the American or Canadian of Scots descent, the archetypal ancestry is one of emigration from the "old country" to the New World, often involving being forced from ancestral lands. The Clearances and a sense of injustice may loom large in many a Scots-American's view of his or her lineage, yet there is a glaring paradox – many of these forced immigrants would pass on the pain, in their displacement of the original North American peoples.

The irony is far from lost on Sandra Muse, right, as she looks forward to coming to The Gathering from Canada next year, when she will visit the lands of her ancestors – some of them, that is. Muse, from Hamilton, Ontario, claims MacRae lineage but is also half Cherokee. A journalist who has worked mainly in Canadian radio but also edited a newspaper for the Six Nations Indian Reserve [www.tekanews.com], Muse is doing a PhD on English literature at Hamilton's McMaster university. Her dissertation is on Cherokee literature and she is also studying diasporas, giving her a unique standpoint from which to comment on the Scots-American phenomenon. "There is a tremendous irony there (in Scottish immigrants involved in the oppression of the First Nations]," says the 51-year-old, "and it happened in both Canada and the United States. A lot of soldiers in the Indian wars in the US, when the last of the Indians were being rounded up and put on reservations, were of Scottish descent." She also refers to Duncan Campbell Scott, a renowned Canadian poet but also a reviled head of the department of Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1932. He made it compulsory for native children to attend Residential Schools that, often amid appalling conditions, attempted to eradicate all traces of native culture and language. It was Scott who declared in 1920: "Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada not absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question." Muse goes on to contrast his attitude with the many Scots settlers who integrated and intermarried with the Cherokee people. "The Scots-Cherokee connection is very strong," she says, citing the famous John Ross, born in 1790, who, though only one-eighth Cherokee by descent, became principal chief of the Cherokee nation, as well as a charismatic politician and orator, deeply committed to his Native American heritage. Even Ross's eloquence could not prevent the mass "removal" – clearance all over again – of 18,000 Cherokees from Georgia to the official Indian Territory in Oklahoma in 1838, which became known as the "Trail of Tears" and on which Ross's wife was among an estimated 4,000 who died on the way. Other high-profile Scots-Cherokees range from Major John Ridge, a Cherokee officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, to Grammy-winning singer Rita Coolidge. Muse's own lineage is pretty well half-and-half, with some Irish and Dutch thrown in, she says. "My mother was a MacRae and we've been able to learn a great deal about her Scottish heritage. My great-great-great grandmother married in 1789 in North Carolina." North Carolina is where so many immigrant Scots arrived during the 18th and 19th centuries that it can now boast more citizens of Scots ancestry than the homeland itself. Muse grew up in Detroit, but came north to Canada after marrying a Mohawk, and has two children: "So they are also Mohawk, and Cayuga, and Cherokee, and some Irish… "I've been reading up on Scottish history, because I grew up not knowing about my Scottish heritage. It was only maybe five years ago I began going to Highland games here, especially the big ones at Fergus, Ontario – I'd always wanted to go but I'd been a single mother for many years, then a student, so didn't have a lot of time. At Fergus I marched in the clan parade two years ago wearing my buckskin dress with my MacRae tartan scarf and that got me quite a bit of attention." Quite apart from the Scots-Cherokee links through contact and intermarriage, Muse sees similarities between the two cultures in their rootedness in the land and in "warrior culture" of both native American and Gael. "Listening to some of the Scottish songs and their pride in battles and the people who were lost… there really is a close connection." She has been reading about the Scottish Enlightenment, and points to 18th-century Scots novelist Henry MacKenzie, best known for The Man of Feeling, but whose later work, The Man of the World, seems to have been influenced by Rousseau's theories of "the natural man" in extolling the virtues of the Cherokee as being "honesty, truth and savage nobleness", compared to those of the European. And she refers to Sir Walter Scott, who in his introduction to Ivanhoe, comments that barely 60 or 70 years had passed "since the whole north of Scotland was under a state of government nearly as simple and as patriarchal* as those of our good allies the Mohawks and Iroquois". "That's an area I'd really like to research some day," she says, "the role North American natives played in early Scottish literature." Muse has no overly romantic illusions about Scotland, which she'll visit for the first time next year as one of a party of 82 MacRaes, and agrees the Scottish diaspora can sometimes have unrealistic expectations. "I think many Scottish people in North America, who have never been in Scotland, expect to go there and find it the way it was in the past. My daughter said, 'I want to go with you and see all the men in kilts.' "I told her that wasn't realistic. I'm longing to come over and learn more, but I'm a realist, I'm not expecting to see lots of men in kilts." WHEN Bruce and Judy McRae lead a party of 82 New World MacRaes to Eilean Donan after The Gathering next summer, it will be their third visit to the castle, which has strong MacRae associations – and this time, they will renew their marriage vows there, 25 years after they first tied the knot. The couple, who live in Colorado, take their clan lineage very seriously: Bruce has backed up his genealogical research with DNA testing which, he claims, suggests distant ancestors of his were constables of Eilean Donan. He says: "When I got to around 30, I started thinking, 'Where did I come from, what is my family?'" So the computer specialist, now 58, started on the long journey back: "My father was born in Texas, his father in Mississippi. The more I traced back, the more I met other families, until I made it back to North Carolina, where the Highland MacRaes came to North America, during 1790-1810. I was so excited to feel I was a part of that, that they'd emigrated from another nation for a better life. I just felt tied to them and there was something inside me wanted to know more." McRae had his DNA tested and says he was within two or three markers of a man who also claims descent from the MacRae constables of Eilean Donan. He and Judy will encourage other members of their party at The Gathering to have DNA testing, "so we can start making some assumptions with good data". Judy claims no Scots blood but is even more passionate about the clan: "It really is important discovering your roots; we both feel it speaks to your identity. I believe it is because so many people that came here from Scotland were forced off the land. This is almost like a spiritual quest for us."

The full article contains 1293 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.

Page 1 of 1

• Last Updated: 15 December 2008 7:39 PM
• Source: The Scotsman
• Location: Edinburgh
• Related Topics: Homecoming

________________________________________ *"patriarchal" ... Mohawk and 'Iroquois' societies are matriarchal.

AUSTRALIA: Claims of child abuse pretext for land grab, uranium mining This is a very horrible act of aggression by the Australian government, under a particularly egregious pretext. This is today ... now ... 2008 ... not 1908. Canada is no less guilty of continuing land grabs, under various guises. Mining and forestry alone consume billions and billions of acres of land worldwide, and total destruction and contamination is inherent in the business: Corporations have a way of sucking out the resources and then going 'bankrupt', thus unaccountable for human and environmental destruction in their wake. But I digress ... again ... This is a gem of a quote (from below), and it is EXACTLY true in Canada: OVER HALF of the budget of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada never leaves Ottawa. 'Canada' (INAC) uses it to pay the cost of defending itself from Aboriginal 'land claims'.

A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

And that is also true in Canada. Do the math: Half the funding leads to half the graduating. nobrainer. Here's the full story from Australia ... http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-generally/38400-australian-aboriginees-face-extinction-genocide.html Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia By John Pilger The Guardian, Friday October 24 2008 Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society's Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people. The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children. In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial. Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery" among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme's source, described as an "anonymous youth worker", was later exposed as a federal government official whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police. The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been "exonerated by an internal inquiry". Shortly before last year's election, Howard declared a "national emergency" and sent the army to the Northern Territory to "protect the children" who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers". Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? "The Rudd government," noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre." In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the "national emergency", 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the "unthinkable numbers". They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was "quarantined". Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: "To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage." What the doctors found they already knew - children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are "economically unviable". The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world's biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it. Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world's largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root - a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard's "mate". "The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse," says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump." What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity's support. John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian